Don’t wave a toy gun at people in a public place. If you must be a child who didn’t know that, don’t be a precociously tall one. Don’t sell loose cigarettes. Don’t have an asthma attack when you’re in a chokehold. They will kill a child with a toy gun. Don’t run.

Don’t wear a hoodie in a white neighborhood. Don’t be above six feet. Don’t wear your pants too low. Don't respond to the drunk white people and their racist taunts at the bar. Don’t look like someone who committed a robbery down the block. Don’t be a threat. Don’t run from police who don’t know the difference between a taser and a gun. Don’t run.

Don’t ask for medical assistance if they hurt you on the way to the station. Don’t try to breathe, they’ll say “fuck your breath.” Don’t throw stones, there’s a camera on the car. There's a camera in the air. Don't just be riding your bike. Don’t hold up your phone, it might look like a gun. Don’t run.

You ran anyway. (Truth is, I would too.) And now they’re chasing you down. This video is now evidence, this is on YouTube. At the end of a blind alley, with no place else to run. A rush of adrenaline, there's a camera and a gun. Don't run.

1 comment:

Vincent Walsh
said...

Deep, this poem captures the essence of the African American experience in U.S. ghettos; it's almost like saying, don't dare trying to live a decent or normal life, don't even dare trying to breathe. Whatever move you make (or refuse to make) could well be the wrong move, could get you shot, could get you jail time, could get you beaten within an inch of your life, just because your skin is black, just because you're at the bottom of the social-darwinist pecking order. Young black men and women (along with not-so-young black men and women) residing in the hood in U.S. inner-cities are treated by U.S. security forces pretty much the same way Palestinians are treated by Israeli occupying forces in Gaza and the West Bank.

Links, Selected Posts

Amardeep Singh, Associate Professor of English at Lehigh UniversityOn Twitter

My book, Diaspora Vérité: The Films of Mira Nair, is forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi in 2018.

I have been working on several digital projects in Scalar. All three are currently in progress as of summer 2017.
One is digital archive I am calling "The Kiplings and India." Working with a team of graduate research assistants, we have been building the site in Scalar here. Feedback welcome; it's a work in progress.

I have also been working on a Digital Collection called "Claude McKay's Early Poetry (1912-1922)" This project began as a collaborative class project called "Harlem Echoes," a digital edition of Claude McKay's "Harlem Shadows." The new version of the project is much-expanded, including McKay's early Jamaican poetry as well as his uncollected political poetry from magazines like The Liberator and Workers Dreadnought.